salon
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Rumpus Round-Up: All the Abramson News Fit to Print
Jill Abramson, the first woman to head the New York Times as executive editor, was abruptly fired Wednesday and replaced by managing editor Dean Baquet. The New Yorker attempted to explain why, with the leading theory being Abramson’s discovery several…
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One Hundred Years of Dublin
Gather round, ye James Joyce devotees: Mark O’Connell has an essay (replete with some pretty nifty info-graphics) up at Salon on the Dublin of the past and present: Everyone in Dubliners is thinking about a way out, if not actively pursuing one; everyone is dreaming of some…
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We Need Diverse Books
#WeNeedDiverseBooks because I never had a protagonist I could fully relate to. This tweet is just one of the many examples of those that can be found from the viral web campaign #WeNeedDiverseBooks. Salon explores this trend, and just what…
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No Reading Necessary
Literary history has two sides, I think. One is the normative side: deciding what is good and what is less good. The other is the explanatory side. It’s two very different modalities of thought, and I’ve always been inclined toward…
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A Reader’s Imaginative Freedom is Absolute
Reading is a private activity, even as it allows us to commune with the mind and imagination of an author we will probably never meet. Yet because reading a great book can be so overwhelmingly gratifying and transformative, many of…
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The Evils of Irony
At one time, irony served to reveal hypocrisies, but now it simply acknowledges one’s cultural compliance and familiarity with pop trends. The art of irony has lost its vision and its edge. The rebellious posture of the past has been…
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The Day Everyone Laughed
Think Wilde, Wodehouse, Carroll, Cervantes—comedy has a thousand-year-old affair with literature. That said, what makes people laugh is as elusive and surprising as it is fascinating. Have you heard of the 1962 Tanganyika laughter epidemic? We’re here in East Africa…
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The Microphone on the Radio Tower
Marina Keegan died in a car accident just five days after she graduated from Yale University. But her writing lives on, and lends an empathetic voice to the often tedious discussions of millennials. From her posthumous essay, “Song for the special,”…
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The Lovers, the Dreamers, and Generation X
The Muppets taught us to think for ourselves, innovate, follow our dreams and make the world a better place. Head over to Salon to learn how the Muppets helped shape a generation of artists and businesspeople, and taught 50 million…
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Money Problems
Reading, writing and thinking are all tasks that are nearly impossible to cultivate while performing manual labor. As Plato first noted, when discussing education, “sleep and exercise are unpropitious to learning,” and therefore students should avoid intense exercise as they…
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The Age of Knowledge
Lately, the news about Woody Allen has been flooding social media outlets. It’s “as if we are playing a national game of Clue,” our very own essays editor, Roxane Gay, writes in a piece featured on Salon. As people pore over…
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The Grimmest Adjuncting Story Yet
D. Watkins is an adjunct professor. He doesn’t make much money, but most of his family and friends are even worse off, struggling with wrongful convictions, the impossibly high cost of health care, and the loss of loved ones to drugs…